Will we fail the science test and go the way of the dodo?

The first time, however, that I saw a child fire a gun, I was the child. This was back in the last century, in the digital dark ages, around 1985. I was 15. Not an infant, but certainly not an adult. I’d gone with my girlfriend to meet her family on their farm. An uncle had a shotgun.

I got on well with my girlfriend’s lovely old grandpa, so he took me along for a yomp through the fields. Grandpa grabbed the gun on the way. He probably said something about scaring birds ravaging crops in the fields, but to be honest I was a townie and not listening. All I could think about was the gun.

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We got to a field, and gramps hands me the gun, saying "Want a go?". I was 15, what do you think I said? I tore grandpa’s arm off. He quickly showed me how to fire, and fire I did. We stood on a hill looking down into a valley, with trees in front of us. I aimed from the hip and fired at the trees. Grandpa screamed "Fire up in the air, you eejit".

But it was too late. We heard the shotgun pellets tip-tap-tip-tap, raining down on something that sounded metal. There was a barn in the valley hidden by trees, with a corrugated iron roof, it turned out. I’d shot at it. Then – bang! A shot was returned, and pellets hit the ground about 50 yards from me and gramps. Whoever owned that barn had shot back.

There was what could be termed "a mighty hollering"’ coming from behind the trees. Perhaps this all foreshadowed my travels through Appalachia, where blood feuds between farming families once splattered murder and mayhem over generations. Thankfully, though, I didn’t start a reprise of the infamous Hatfields and McCoys clan war vendetta.

Gramps grabbed me and we ran back to the farm, before anyone saw who we were, never to speak of what we’d done. As a coda to the story, let me just add the location: Northern Ireland. Not the best place to mess about with guns on a Sunday afternoon.

You don’t need to be Aesop to see the simple moral of the tale: keep idiot children away from lethal technology.

The irony is this, though: humanity is an idiot child when it comes to the most terrifying technologies we’ve invented. I once sneered at modern-day Luddites, the type who told us back in the late 1990s that the internet would destroy us.

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But they were right. In centuries – perhaps decades, if we’re lucky – our children’s children will look back at this period and wonder how in hell we ever thought it a good plan to unleash unregulated hate and conspiracy across the world, to hand every extremist a megaphone to stir catastrophe.

Why didn’t we simply regulate the internet and social media the way we regulate the press and broadcasting? Was it so hard? Instead, what could have been a global library and communications system became a planetary battleground.

Humanity is a child obsessed with fire. We’re drawn to risk and danger. We never think of the consequences. Today, we learn that scientists are about to bring the extinct dodo back to life. They’ll take dodo genes and insert them into its closely-related living relative, the pigeon. There are similar plans underway to resurrect the mammoth.

Artist interpretation of the dodo in its natural habitat (Image: Newsquest)

Now, I don’t think we’re going to end up with a real-life Jurassic Park here, with revived T-Rexes eating us like sardines in our cars, but I do ask "why"? Is this the best use of humanity’s Promethean genius? Might it not serve science better to work on keeping the planet’s currently endangered species alive, rather than Frankensteining the extinct?

It’s similar to the current obsession among the likes of Elon Musk to colonise space – an obsession, I confess, I shared until recently when I began to think much longer and harder about humanity’s technological madness. Why not save the Earth, rather than people the Moon?

Recently, I was speaking to the Scottish poet Don Paterson, who shares my unease at humanity’s use of technology. He summed up rather succinctly how I feel. “We came off the savannah far too soon,” Paterson said.

What he means is: humanity has moved too fast. Emotionally we’re still apes in the trees, technologically we’re like gods able to walk among the stars. We should have spent much longer evolving emotionally. If our technological prowess and our emotional intelligence were better balanced, then how much happier the world would be.

By the time Isaac Newton unlocked gravity’s secrets, we were still burning witches. Imagine if we’d harnessed some emotional intelligence to our powers of invention and poured resources into technologies to benefit humankind; the leaps we could have made in medicine. We can destroy the world, yet we cannot cure cancer. Perhaps a little more emotional intelligence and it might have been the other way around.

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Was the internet worth it? Was it worth all the jobs lost, the bonds broken, all the ugliness, just to send videos – maybe of funny cats, or maybe of innocent people being beheaded – to your pal who sits beside you at work?

Technology is taking us to the brink of destruction, via a burning Earth. Maybe when we hit rock bottom, when the planet brings us to our knees, we’ll rebalance the scales of emotional intelligence and technological prowess. That’s if we’re lucky of course. If we’re not lucky, then like the Dodo we may well exit the stage as another evolutionary failure.